The proliferation of portable, lightweight and high-quality digital cameras (and their attendant electronic control systems) has naturally led to the incorporation of these devices in a wide variety of applications that would have historically been considered unfeasible given space, power consumption and other practical constraints.
Similarly, advances in mobile electronics have made remotely-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (“UAVs” and commonly referred to as drones) more prevalently available. A common UAV configuration includes multiple small, electrically operated, vertically or horizontally-oriented propellers placed at the center or near the distal edges of the UAV's body. The combination of these improved UAV's with lightweight and high-quality digital cameras has led to a proliferation of new recreational and commercial applications for the resulting high-quality UAV photography that can be obtained with these arrangements.
Typically, a digital camera that is mounted on a UAV has a dedicated image processing unit to control triggering, image acquisition and image transfer, among various other control functions that are required to operate a digital camera that is mounted to the moving vehicle in a remote fashion. However, in some applications, multiple digital cameras are mounted on a single UAV in order to obtain a number of simultaneous or near-simultaneous images wherein each image captures a different spectral range. Such applications are commonplace in military, security and agricultural applications, to mention a few.
However, it will be readily appreciated that given the limitations on current battery technology, it is desirable to keep the electronic components of a UAV as lightweight and energy efficient as possible in order to minimize the UAV's power consumption and prolong the UAV's available flight time. As such, in multiple camera configurations it is desirable to minimize the electrical hardware weight and power consumption. More specifically, it would be desirable to limit the number of separate image processing units that are required to operate multiple digital cameras, and as a result also limiting the overall size of the circuit board that is required for the operation of the UAV.
Accordingly, there is need for systems and methods adapted to minimize the number of image processors required to operate multiple digital cameras while minimizing the overall delay between the trigger signal for each of the multiple digital cameras in order to ensure near-simultaneous images are captured by each of the multiple digital cameras.